This is part 2 of our ongoing mini-series on “future” as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. We talk to Eman Abdelhadi who explains that every liberation struggle is ultimately a struggle for a different future, one that rebels against the unjust present and past.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion, and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of “Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072,” a sci-fi novel published in 2022 with Common Notions Press. Her academic work has been published in numerous sociology journals and covered by press outlets such as the Washington Post, Associated Press, and NPR. Her public writing has appeared in In These Times, Jacobin, Truthout and other outlets. She is based in Chicago, where she is also a community organizer with the Salon Kawakib Collective, Faculty for Justice in Palestine and other formations.
Eman and her co-author M. E. O’Brien wrote a speculative novel about a liberated future called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. Eman and M. E. also published a short story that is a continuation of the novel. The story is called “Sharaner Maash, or a haunting from the time before.” And in the episode, we mention a Truthout podcast “Palestine Solidarity Encampments Are a Rehearsal for Liberatory Self-Governance” that Eman was recently on.
Future with Eman Abdelhadi
Yulia: This is Unpacking Zionism. I’m Yulia Gilich, you host and a member of the founding collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. This is part two of our ongoing mini-series about “future” as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. Each episode in the series is independent and you can listen to them in any order. But I strongly recommend that you check out last week’s conversation with Nayrouz Abu Hatoum in which we discuss Palestinian temporality, decolonization, and return.
Today we are talking to Eman Abdelhadi who is an organizer, writer, and academic based in Chicago. Eman and her co-author M. E. O’Brien wrote a speculative novel about a liberated future called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. You can find a link to the novel in the episode notes where we also include a link to a short story by Eman and M. E. that is a continuation of the novel. The story is called “Sharaner Maash, or a haunting from the time before.”
This episode is about understanding that every liberation struggle is ultimately a struggle for a different future, one that rebels against the unjust present and past. Eman, Welcome. Thank you for joining us.
Eman: Thank you so much for having me.
Yulia: You know, as I was planning for this interview, I realized that I can’t say the word futures (plural), or speculative or speculation without people thinking I’m talking about a hedge fund.
Eman: Says it all about the position we’re in in society right now, that even the word futures has been colonized.
Yulia: 100%. So I just want to make sure we’re clear that in this conversation, futures (plural) has nothing to do with hedge funds, but refers to the idea that future is not predetermined. There are multiple futures that we and the planet may live out. So I want to start with a big picture question. What is the role of future, singular or plural, in liberation struggles, and what role future plays in your work as a scholar, writer and organizer.
Eman: I would say that every liberation struggle is fundamentally about writing a different future, is about rebelling against a present and a trajectory that are unjust, that are less than what we deserve. So movements are inherently future-oriented. They are inherently thinking about tomorrow. And I think that in some ways, we have been on such a bleak trajectory, and we are up against so much in liberation struggles that folks have sometimes lost sight of the fact that movements are future oriented, and sometimes folks are participating in a sort of, well, we just have to do something, but without any idea of like, what would it mean to win and what would the future, what should the future actually look like? What is it that we are fighting for? What version of our lives do we want to lead? What version of the planet do we want to have? What version of society do we want to create together? And in my work and the novel that I co-wrote with M.E. O’Brien, it’s all about bringing this conversation about the future into the present? It’s all about bringing that conversation into our organizing, but also into our consciousness, to shift our relationship with the future, to sort of reject this vision of doom that I think a lot of us have been developing, rightfully so, over the last couple of decades.
Yulia: Absolutely. Before we get to the conversation about the novel, Everything for Everyone, I want to pause on the doom for a moment just to understand the stakes of liberation struggles, and specifically the Palestinian liberation struggle. Can you explain how Zionism curtails Palestinian future?
Eman: Yeah, I mean, Zionism attempts to erase Palestinians out of the future. It attempts to render Palestinians a sort of relic of the past, and even then, a hardly acknowledged one, right? One of the common phrases in the early Zionist movement, it was that “the old will die and the young will forget.” And this is a statement about the future, a future in which Palestinians simply cease to exist, in which our memories of Palestine, our trauma of having been displaced from Palestine, and all of the consequences of that displacement and that trauma that has infiltrated so much of our lives, would simply disappear. And you know, we talk about the Nakba as an ongoing event, and not as a one time event. And for many of us, thinking about our family histories is thinking through a sort of ongoing series of catastrophes initiated by Zionist colonization of Palestine and its consequences for our lives, for our children’s lives. So yeah, Zionism is a project also about the future. It’s a project that attempts to colonize that future, just like it colonizes the land, right? It’s a future of erasure. I think that for right-wing Zionists, there’s a future where there’s no Palestine and Palestinians are erased from memory. And for liberal Zionists, there’s a sort of mea culpa, you know, white guilt flagellation, right? You can kind of anticipate the land acknowledgements that are going to happen, right? And the museums to Palestinian history and the sort of oops of it all. And Palestinians have insisted for 75 years, and will continue to insist that we are a part of the future, that actually decolonization is the future, and that Zionism is a failed project to erase us, one that we will fight tooth and nail and that our children will fight. And so I think that the future is central to the Palestinian struggle.
Yulia: Yeah, in the novel, Kawkab Hassan, the Palestinian character, also talks about this Zionist motto “the old will die and the young will forget” and explains that in fact, the opposite happened. He says about his family and Palestinians more broadly, I quote here, “We made it our business never to forget,” end of quote. Which meant that Palestine went everywhere Palestinians went. And the expulsion and exile of Palestinians from Palestine meant that their struggle spread out much further and had a global reach. And I want to ask you about the geographic reach of the novel. I’m particularly interested in the chapter about the liberation of the Levant, and we’ll talk about that in more detail in a moment, but the book is set in New York. Can you walk us through the relationship between these different global geographies, liberation, and future and why New York City is at the center of the novel.
Eman: The book imagines a global revolution that, in many ways, starts kind of in tandem in the Levant and in Central America, and that spreads quickly throughout the world, because we are in a moment of global crisis of the nation state and capitalism, that these social institutions are no longer able to sustain themselves, no longer able to cope with the various crises, the climate crises, the market crises, the humanitarian crises that they themselves created. And so they’re starting to fall apart. And so the global revolution begins in places where the state is at its weakest. And so we think about Central America, and we think about the Levant as these kind of starting places. We think of Europe and the US, where we have the strongest states, as actually coming towards the end of the global revolution. I think even on the left in the West, despite all of our rhetoric about decoloniality and our rhetoric about white supremacy and European exceptionalism and US exceptionalism, we still sometimes perpetuate the idea that we are somehow the leaders of, we are going to be the leaders of global liberation, when in reality, liberation struggles have generally been led by the most oppressed people and have only made their way towards the West slowly and reluctantly, right? So I think that book is nodding to that, is acknowledging that. The book is centered in New York, because, you know the authors, we both have New York connections. And so for folks listening who aren’t familiar with our book, it’s a series of fictional oral histories with people who’ve participated in the revolution or who grew up in a revolutionary future. And we’re sort of writing the history of the future, right? And New York is one of the last places, and the US in general is one of the last places to sort of reach this liberation future, which is helpful for us as a book, because then we get to talk about the global revolution and how it unfolds over decades.
Yulia: Right. So let’s talk about one of the first revolutions and liberations of the book, and it’s the liberation of Palestine and the broader Levant region. Tell us more about that version of the future, by which I mean, tell us that liberation story.
Eman: Yeah. I mean, this is a version of the future that basically is a microcosm of the kind of broader theory of revolution in the book, which is that increasing crisis poses pressure on the state systems. And we already see that in the Levant, right? We have places like Lebanon that have an incredibly weak state, places like Syria where, you know, there’s sort of proxy wars, and it’s been a crumbling order. And effectively, what happens is that the offers of Zionism to its beneficiaries, to settlers, to the descendants of settlers, stop working, right, that the kind of pressures on this society become too intense. And so, you know, Israel has one of the highest rates of dual citizenship in the world, if not the highest. So there’s enormous emigration out of Israel by settlers. That’s already happened, actually, in the last nine months, I think, 220,000 people have left Israel. And then there’s a sort a beginning of the recognition that the bargain in which you have a Jewish supremacist state that offers you all the kind of benefits that are tied to the oppression of Palestinians, that are only possible through land theft and an apartheid system like what we have right now, begin to sort of fall apart, are facing too much pressure from within and without that. There is external pressure in the form of sort of isolation of Israel in recognition of its apartheid regime. But then there’s also all this internal pressure. And eventually that pressure kind of bursts. So there are people who have the privilege to leave and they do, but it’s not a future built on massive out migration, actually. It’s primarily liberation through a shift in the sort of power structure of the area. And so the Zionist state falls apart, and so a state of Jewish supremacy and Palestinian erasure falls apart, and then people have to figure out new ways to sort of live together. This also is happening in tandem with this modern nation state as a form also falling apart elsewhere, and so it’s not replaced by a different state. That’s the broader story of the book.
Yulia: You started talking about some of the things that the book describes that began unfolding in front of our eyes in the past nine months. And based on the eerie parallels between the book and the present-day reality, on one hand it feels like we are living the future the book has predicted which should feel I guess hopeful. But on the other hand, instead of liberation, we’re seeing the vicious genocidal response of the Israeli state. So I wonder if the current moment changed how you think about the future.
Eman: I think I’m more committed than ever to a future that doesn’t rely on states. I mean, the present looks different than the present of the book, in part because the state in this current moment is much stronger than the state in the book. But even now, right, even with Israel, as strong as it is, they have been losing the war public opinion, despite pouring, as we saw in the Guardian report, millions and millions and millions of dollars, into attempting to control the American public’s image of them. And their economy has tanked over the last nine months. Israeli stocks are the worst traded stocks in the world at this moment. Investment has completely fallen apart. So I remain committed to this broader theory of the book and the broader vision of the future, but I didn’t imagine the level of destruction that would happen along the way, in part because I imagined all of this happening kind of further along where the state has already weakened. And I think that I, like everyone else, couldn’t have foreseen this level of atrocity. Every day, I think, wow, I have seen the worst thing I ever thought I could possibly see, and then I see something else that is far worse that I couldn’t have imagined. But if there’s anything we learned over the last 20 years, to destroy a place is not to triumph over it. I mean, we learned that in Iraq, we learned that in Afghanistan. We learned that even earlier, in Vietnam, right. Mass death and mass destruction are not the same thing as a victory. They’re not the same thing as triumph in a war.
Yulia: Yeah, truly. I want to return to the text of the novel for a moment again. I want to return to the text of the novel for a moment. Again, Kawkab Hassan, the Palestinian character, who participated in the liberation of Palestine in the book, says that once Palestine was liberated, the rest of the Levant followed suit. And more broadly, Palestine became a model of liberation globally. So can you say more about Palestine being a model of liberation and about the centrality of Palestinian liberation to all of our futures?
Eman: I want to just say, you know, on this point that I think it’s always important to remember that Palestinians didn’t want to be your heroes. We just wanted to live on our land and not watch our people die every day and go through horrific levels of oppression. We are just ordinary human beings doing what human beings do under these conditions. And I think anyone in our position would have done what we’ve done.
But also, there is so much to say about this. You know, Israel loves to have this idea of like we are, you know, this oppressed country, in the midst of all these hostile neighbors. And we’ve seen over the nine months, that in fact, they are in a neighborhood full of allies, right? The Arab regimes, almost without exception, are united behind Israel and are supportive of it, both materially and ideologically. And one of the reasons for that is that the idea of a liberated Arab population in the region is terrifying to these states, the idea that we could liberate ourselves, that you could throw off the oppression. Because the reality is that the entire Arab world was occupied. We live under puppet regimes that facilitate a new form of colonialism that robs our countries of their resources. And I think that’s true of a lot of the Global South. But it’s certainly the case in the Arab world that Palestinian Liberation has long posed an enormous threat to Arab autocrats, and that’s been true from the beginning. We’ve seen it in the repression of Palestinian activism. We’ve seen it in the constant betrayal Palestinian cause. But also, Palestine has been a rallying cry for the entire region, right? There was a beautiful piece recently in the Spectre magazine about the sort of ways that Palestinian organizing and Palestinian uprising helped inspire almost every sort of uprising in Egypt, for example. That you could trace back these moments of uprising to moments of Palestinian uprising. And for the average Arab, for the Arab Street, as we like to talk about it, Palestine is the great wound of history, right? And every country in the region has had to pay a price for the settler colonial presence of Israel, both a material price and an ideological one. And so you already have a region of the world that is incredibly invested in Palestinian liberation, and in which Palestinian liberation represents so much more than just this piece of land.
But globally, that’s the case as well, because this is a settler colonial project that began just as the world was decolonizing, or was seeming to decolonize, pretending to be moving to a system of human rights and global liberalism and a system of world order through the UN and other institutions. You have the same atrocity that had been happening 200-300 years before in other places, right? The same onslaught onto native land, the same double standards, the same level of destruction and just naked oppression. And so Palestine, I think, captures so many people, because it is the crack, right? It’s the most kind of visible crack in the Western liberal world order. It has always been the litmus test that says, no, this whole world order that you are imposing on us and lecturing us about is bullshit, and it’s bullshit in so many other ways, not just in terms of Palestine, but Palestine captures it so clearly and nakedly, right? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you know, when you walk around East Africa, you walk around parts of West Africa, you walk around parts of Central America, you see pictures of Palestinian liberation fighters in cafes alongside all these other third world heroes. But even in the West in the last you know 10 years, people have come to see this as a symbol of the brokenness of so-called Western democracy and Western liberalism. So in the US, we’re in the moment where we’re saying, wait a minute, the majority of the US public wants one thing, wants a ceasefire, wants to stop arming Israel, wants to condition aid to Israel, and yet almost all of our electeds are saying the exact opposite. So where is our democracy then? Wait a minute, we are supposed to be this country that is famously pro free speech. But why are our protesters getting their asses handed to them for peaceful demonstrations? We’re supposed to have a free press. And yet, look, when you compare, Palestinians are always described as having been killed by mysterious forces. The double standard is so so open and so naked, right? And so Palestine is once again exposing the pure hypocrisy of these various kind of liberal institutions that are supposed to be our salvation and are supposed to be the salvation of the entire world. And I think we have a newer and newer generation saying something is really wrong here that goes beyond just Palestine. So I think Palestine has come to be central to all of our liberation.
Yulia: Yeah, Palestine has been and remains the thing that radicalized so many of us, and in the past nine months, I’ve seen so many new people jump into organizing with so much vigor, commitment, and energy, and maybe they have become disillusioned for the first time, or maybe they have been repeatedly, but they recognize the stakes of why we’re fighting for a different future.
Eman: I mean, now that I am old enough to have gone through different waves of protests and different waves of movement, you realize that the new generation is radicalized by the events of their lives. And this is why I am such a huge advocate for youth organizing and not standing in the way of young people when they organize. Because not just are they kind of structurally in a better position to take risks, right? You know, they don’t have a mortgage yet. They don’t have kids yet in most cases. But it’s also that they don’t have the wounds of having tried and failed in the past, or not even failed, but having been tried and then brutally repressed and defeated. And I think that we need that, those new waves of people to come in. And I think that this new generation, they’re inheriting a legacy of struggle and analysis that has been decades in the making. And so when young people today are like, wait, something is really wrong. They’re also entering into a political education and a political analysis that says, you know what’s wrong here is not just this one thing, and actually it’s connected. Like police abolition is connected to Palestine, is connected to capitalism, is connected to queer struggle, is connected to environmental struggle, is connected to Native rights everywhere, right? The problem is a global system that renders some people disposable and functionally not human, not deserving of the full rights of human beings, while privileging the desires and the greed of other groups of people. And it’s really exciting to see people enter politics to this much more refined analysis than I think was available, for example, for me when I was like 19, there was still this kind of piecemeal thing of like, this issue matters, this issue matters, not that like, these are all symptoms of the same global rot.
Yulia: Absolutely. You were recently on the Truthout podcast that we will link to in episode notes. And you spoke about student encampments and specifically that at UChicago. And now, with most if not all of the student encampments gone, and raided, and swept, and sort of otherwise dismantled across the US, often with a tremendous degree of violence, you still highlighted the significance of those encampments for the movement. Can you say more about how they will reverberate in the future?
Eman: Whenever M.E. and I have talked about our book, right? People always say, what makes you think the communes would work? And we always say, it’s because we’ve seen it happen, right? We’ve seen the incredible amount of energy and creativity and efficiency and just amazing human capacity that emerges in social movement moments when people are called upon to feed ourselves, to protect ourselves, to shelter ourselves, to take care of each other outside of the logics of profit. For me, I saw that after like Hurricane Sandy, I saw it after Occupy, I saw it in the Movement of the Squares, you know, I saw it on the streets during the Movement for Black Lives, we saw it at Standing Rock. We saw it over and over and over and over. And now a new generation has seen it, has experienced, it has felt it, has had the visceral experience of living differently, even if for just a few days. You know, I met with a student of mine a week after the encampment, and I said, well, how are you doing? And he said, it’s just so hard to have seen what life could be like, that it could be different than this, than this atomized existence that we’re in, right, this like hyper-consumerism. And to have experienced something so different, right, so fundamentally different, to be in this camp where you were in constant community and in conversation, and the amount of love and energy in that. I’m so grateful to the encampments for having given first my generation and older generations a reminder, and even more than a reminder, but to say, look, it’s even better now. When I walked around these encampments, I was like, it’s everything lovely. Like actually, this generation has learned so many of the lessons that we try to pass on, and it’s even more caring and it’s even more thoughtful. And so to see that, right, and then to have given a new generation this taste of freedom. You know, I’ve written that once we have that taste it, we hunger after it for the rest of our lives, right? You don’t get to taste that and then just let it go. And of course, you have to grieve going back to this system, but now that you’ve seen that something else is possible, hopefully you orient around that in your work and activism and in your mind.
Yulia: Yeah, and I feel like it’s both the taste for freedom, but also the realization that it’s entirely possible to organize ourselves differently. It’s not some unattainable fantasy, and now so many more people have experienced it at the encampments.
Eman: Absolutely. I mean, my god, this is like the tiny microcosm of it. Imagine if all of society was oriented towards this level of care and this level of mutual aid. It would be incredible.
Yulia: I want to ask you something that I’m asking all my guests in this series about future. I’ll preface it by saying that I think this question has been weaponized against Palestinians and I feel ambivalent about approaching it at all. And it’s a question that the book sort of inadvertently answers – that is what will happen to the settlers, what will happen to Jewish Israelis when Palestine is free. So I’m not asking you to answer this question. But how did you approach tackling it in the book? And how do you feel about having to contend with this question more broadly, beyond the novel?
Eman: This is one of those interesting questions that gets launched at Palestinians a lot, and the subtext in the question is often that any risk to Jewish Israelis is worth the extermination of Palestinians. That is the fundamental subtext. I have been in this movement my entire life, probably the first Palestine protest I attended was when I was 10 years old, and I have never seen a call for the mass expulsion of Jewish Israelis. I have never seen a call for extermination of Jewish Israelis. What I have seen a call for is Jewish Israelis to accept that living in historic Palestine means living with Palestinians and living in a society that is not fundamentally built on Jewish supremacy, and the idea that that is unacceptable rests on two premises that I think are fundamentally problematic. One is the idea that Palestinians are barbarians and can’t be lived with, right? So a sort of common kind of response is like, do you really want to live in an Arab country, right, meaning that that is something no one would ever want to do. And with it the racist ideas of demographic threats and Arabs having too many children, and all these things that we have seen wielded against brown and Black people for centuries. The other is what I read as an antisemitic view that, like Jews are never going to accept this is something that I hear all the time, and I find that really hard to stomach. I don’t understand that.
Yulia: I think it’s pretty spot on. I mean, Zionism is so deeply rooted in antisemitism that I don’t think it’s a wrong read.
Eman: And I think this goes back to the 20th century, and like understanding that Jewish migration to Palestine was not the issue. The issue was the creation of a Jewish supremacist state that exterminates and controls Palestinians. There could have been a scenario of mass Jewish migration to historic Palestine that doesn’t result in all of this. That didn’t result in expulsion. There was plenty of room. This was not like an extremely densely populated place. So the book tries to sort of address that, and it doesn’t shy away from the need for armed resistance and the fact that, you know there would be confrontations.
Yulia: Now I want to zoom out a little and ask you about the broad vision of the future in the book. I would characterize it as anti-capitalist, decolonial, abolitionist. How else would you describe it? What are some other fundamental pillars of the future that can sustain freedom and liberation?
Eman: Yeah, I would say that the book is anti-capitalist. I mean, I would call it a communist future, but with the note that this is not state-sponsored communism. This is a state abolitionist future. So some people might call it anarcho-communist. It’s in line with a set of leftist theorizing called communization theory. Basically, the structure of the society is one in which most of production and most of reproduction happens in the context of these small kind of elective communities that most people live in communes that are anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand people that organize food and care, but also potentially have syndicates of labor to kind of organize whatever they produce in a broader world economy. So it’s a world economy that’s not coordinated by the state or the ruling class, but is basically care driven and need driven and organized kind of organically in these more democratic spaces. So communes are generally consent based. They have assemblies. There isn’t a sort of hierarchy of authority in them. And in part, because there isn’t the sort of mass accumulation of property in this system. So this is not a money based system, but exchange based economy, but one in which the basic needs of human life are not commodified. So you don’t ever have to pay rent in order to have shelter. You don’t ever have to pay for food. And if folks are interested more in this kind of system, and I want to pursue more fiction, I would say the closest kind of vision of a society to the one that we’re describing is Ursula K. Le Guin The Dispossessed that I would recommend as a sort of supplementary reading.
Yulia: You know, I often have a hard time with speculative fiction, but I think of your book as speculative documentary? It was so easy for me to just drop in and be immersed in this future.
Eman: I think that exact thing is why a lot of people connected with it, right, that it felt kind of plausibly related to our world. It wasn’t just like really far into the future or in a very different planetary context or whatever, and that’s exactly how we intended it.
Yulia: I want to change gears and ask you about your other book called Impossible Futures. I understand that it’s your research where you consider who gets to live out the futures that they imagined for themselves, and particularly in the Muslim American context. So I wonder if you can walk us through the implications of your research for all kinds of futures that we just talked about.
Eman: So the book is about basically women being kind of forced to or pushed to leave Muslim communities in the US because of a sort of double standard around their behavior that basically tasks them with, like, maintaining all the community norms in a moment of anxiety about Muslim futures, right? So there’s a sense of like, will Islam survive in America? How will it look? And all of that anxiety plays out on like what women are wearing, who they’re hanging out with, you know. Meanwhile, men get to have these kind of experimental lives, where they do the Muslim thing, they do the like party thing, they come back when they’re ready to settle down. And the community sort of gives a lot of space and room for error to men. And so what ends up happening is that women slowly over time leave, because they don’t feel like they really have a choice to stay. And men get to lead out the lives that they thought they would lead, right, the kind of normative Muslim lives that they grew up expecting, the nice Muslim home, the Muslim partner, etc. And women, on the other hand, have to kind of carve out these alternative futures for themselves. And it doesn’t always feel, you know, liberatory. It often feels very sad, right? It’s a disconnection from a community and a set of practices and beliefs that are meaningful for people.
So I think that in a way, we are in a position as a society, like zooming out to everyone, where the future is uncertain, right? And more and more of us are being left out of the normative script of what life was supposed to be like, right? For millennials who are middle class, we’re the first generation in a long time that is actually losing wealth compared to our parents, whose standard of living is decreasing. Our parents could buy houses. We can’t buy houses. We can barely afford rent. And if you move into different parts of the class strata, it’s even worse, right? And then more and more of the world is migratory, is displaced, right? So these are also interrupted futures. These are also impossible futures. Moments in which people who grow up thinking they’re going to lead a particular kind of life, and that life is taken away from them by structural circumstances. To me, that’s the vision of what the impossible future is. The organizer in me and the activist in me is like the impossible future can also be an opportunity to imagine together an alternative. And in fact, even in my book on Muslim Americans, you kind of see that the women who are leaving, they leave an imprint behind on the community. By their very exit, they are posing all these questions to the community that they’ve left behind, and kind of showing a breakdown in the system of that community. And I think that, you know, we are starting to see Muslim communities in the US attempt to address this with new institutions and new ways of doing things. Zooming out globally, we also have an opportunity to say, if our script for what a good life is is impossible for more and more and more and more people, something’s wrong, right? That’s usually a sign that something isn’t working. And so we get to imagine together an alternative to the present that hopefully rectifies that.
Yulia: Eman, what would you like us to end on? What should listeners take away from our conversation?
Eman: I think that in any social movement space, I would encourage people to sit down and think through what their vision of the future is, in the short term and in the long term, and in the medium term, right, really trying to imagine what winning would look like. What would winning look like today, what would winning look like in six months, what would winning look like in a couple years, what is it for our children. I think that we need to kind of bring the future back into social movements. I think that it makes for better organizing, it makes for more intentional and more effective political action.
Yulia: Eman, thank you for this incredible conversation. Listeners, check out the episode notes to find the transcript of this interview, the link to Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien’s book Everything for Everyone and their short story “Sharaner Maash, or a haunting from the time before.”
We will be back next week with a new conversation about keywords in Critical Zionism Studies.
Until then, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.